Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
Photograph: Antonio Olmos/Observer

In 2014, a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem published a book with the ambitious aim of outlining the story of humanity. Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind made him a global sensation, garnering fans such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. In 2016, the New York Times bestseller was followed by the equally far-reaching Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, described in the Observer as “a highly seductive scenario planner for the numerous ways in which we might overreach ourselves”.

Harari in his own words

“Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.”

“Modernity is a deal [...] The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”

“I do find it worrying that the basis of the future, not only of humankind, the future of life, is now in the hands of a very small group of entrepreneurs.”

“Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.”

“Many people in their teens wonder about these big questions, what’s the meaning of life, what are we doing here, then somewhere in their 20s they seem to say: ‘I’ll just get married. I’ll just have kids. I’ll get back to that later.’ But they never do. For me, it kept boiling.”